


for the world to become good

by pippuri



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: & the second chapter is new!, Alternate Universe - Road Trip, F/F, the first chapter is a repost from an old account i had on here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:21:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24806875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pippuri/pseuds/pippuri
Summary: buffy licks her lips and glances back at the room, something desperate in her eyes.'i need a drink,' she manages, and grabs the keys from your hands.///after s7 finale au
Relationships: Faith Lehane/Buffy Summers
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is something i wrote in 2015 or thereabouts, and i'm Desperately bored so i'm reposting it from my orphaned account along with a second chapter i just wrote! i used to write on here under the name kiira, but orphaned all my work about 4 years ago, if you recognize the writing :)

You leave in the middle of the night. 

You leave in the middle of the night, and the girl next to you doesn’t even wake up. She’s new, didn’t even fight in Sunnydale, and she seems soft. Willow’s in a chair, and her girlfriend, the hot one with the tongue piercing or the nose piercing or the whatever is slumped against the door with a gun in her hand.

You always knew you liked her, even as you take the car keys from her back pocket, stick her gun in your waistband. 

/

Buffy’s standing outside the motel room, and she scares the shit out of you.

She’s the only one left who can do that, and she smirks a little as you jam the gun away.

“Fuck, Buffy, I could have shot you,” and she shrugs.

“Yeah,” and doesn’t really finish her sentence, just swings her ponytail over her shoulder.

 _You didn’t,_ she seems to say, or maybe _you wouldn’t_. 

The night is cold, desert cold, and Buffy’s only in a tank top and what you think are Dawn’s shorts. Some part of you wants to offer her your jacket but you: you are not soft. 

“You going somewhere?” She finally asks, jutting her chin at the keys in your hand, your boots, the way you’re on your toes. 

“No,” except you’re a terrible liar, especially to her. 

The neon motel sign buzzes, the vacancy sign flickering on and off and on and off and on and off until –– 

Buffy licks her lips and glances back at the room, something desperate in her eyes. 

“I need a drink,” she manages, and grabs the keys from your hands. 

/

You drive, because Buffy’s hand are shaking so much. 

/

The sun’s rising in Arizona when she turns to you with a cheery grin and suggests breakfast. 

It’s not for another hour that you find a diner by the side of the road, and diner would be on the generous side of the spectrum. Buffy hops out of the car, and puts her hair back up into a ponytail.

It’s close to ninety degrees out, and she’s still shivering –– you buy her pancakes with money you stole from Willow and wonder how you got here. 

Buffy flirts with the waitress, and gets directions to the nearest town, ten gallons of gas and the girl’s phone number. You’re not sure whether to be amused or jealous; you can still feel your gun pressing against the small of your back. 

She falls asleep in the sunlight and you could think she almost smiled. 

/

Willow calls you on Buffy’s cell after thirty-seven hours, and Buffy ignores the call. You call Willow in the next town on a pay phone and she starts yelling at you.

“Where did you take her, Faith, I swear to _god,_ if you talked her into going somewhere – ”

You mostly start tuning her out – you were sixteen and scared and that’s how they’re all going to remember you forever. 

After you let her get good and angry, you just hang up. The only one of them you can handle talking to for more than a couple minutes is Dawn, and she didn’t even really exist the first time around. 

/ 

/

It’s not until somewhere in Colorado that you get to use the gun; it’s not until Colorado that the violence catches up to you. 

The vampire practically jumps you, and your heart is pounding before you can even start to register the situation, you have the gun pressed to its head, trigger squeezed even as Buffy’s screaming “Stake, Faith, stake,” at you. 

It’s her who has to kill it, pull a stake from some pocket of the backpack she picked up in Utah and shove it into the thing’s unbeating heart. 

“What the _fuck_ , Faith,” she spits out, blonde hair in her eyes, your gun in her hands, “what the actual fuck?” 

It’s her turn to shove the gun into her waistband (you probably need a better place to put it) and she takes the keys from you. 

“I panicked,” you try to say back, except she’s too far away to hear you, and you’re not entirely sure you even speak. 

She’s turned the car around by the time you get to her, and your gun is sitting on the center console, accusing, guilty. 

“Don’t fucking touch that,” she says, doesn’t look at you, and in the same breath, “what _happened_ to you?”

“I dunno,” you try, and Buffy starts the engine again.

It’s not until you’re half asleep in the passenger seat that she tries talking again, your gun rattling between you. 

“I’m sorry, you know, about everything that happened senior year. I never wanted anything to actually happen to you,” and you laugh.

“You tried to kill me, babe,” and you meant it as a joke, except she makes a kind of choked sobbing noise. 

No one talks after that because: Buffy can’t drive if she’s crying, because: you can’t sleep without a gun under your pillow. 

/

In the empty stretch of land between Kansas and Missouri she claimed your leather jacket as her own, the hazy lines between you stretched. 

/

“Do we have enough for a motel room?” and most nights you don’t (in some towns you pick up odd jobs; washing dishes, babysitting, mowing lawns). 

Most nights you sleep in the car, her head on your shoulder, you slumped over in her lap; wake up with her nervous fingers tapping out a rhythm on your spine, her lips pressed against your shoulder. It becomes normal – Buffy buys a blanket in a Walmart in Iowa, and it’s everything you would have probably wanted out of a quilt at eight years old, light pink with white polka dots.

Buffy’s smirking as she shows it to you, so you make her carry it around all day, remind her that she’s older than you are and if _anyone_ could get away with buying this _monstrosity_ it would be you.

“After all,” you remind her, “you’re _ages_ older than me,” and Buffy’s face falls. 

You’re practically the same age as her – twenty-one to her twenty-three – but she did the math once, figured out you weren’t even seventeen when you first met her. And she was eighteen then, still a kid too, but somehow she feels responsible.

(The night she figured it all out she looked at you with big eyes, “You were younger than _Dawn_ ,” and everything in you wanted to let her forget).

“Sorry,” you whisper to her, “I forgot,” and she shakes her head.

“Not really your fault,” and it’s not hers either.

You just curl your fingers into hers, hold her hand as you walk down a dusty nowhere street. 

/

“Are you ever gonna go back, B?” You ask her one night, after she’s curled up in your lap in the backseat. You’re combing your fingers through her hair, and she stiffens slightly. 

“New topic,” she singsongs and you flip the light on.

“We can’t keep running forever,” and she shrugs, your hands tangled in her hair. 

“We _can’t_ ,” you insist again, and responsibility feels heavy on your tongue. 

“We can try,” she whispers, and presses a kiss to your hip. 

You turn the light back off because if you don’t you’re not sure whether you would kiss her or push her off. She falls asleep; you stare at the outline of your gun in the seat pocket.

/

“I called Dawn today,” she says in Pennsylvania. 

When you kiss her, you can taste salt.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you've fucked so much up with buffy; you don’t want to fuck this up too. 
> 
> she'll kiss you quite suddenly when the car’s stopped at a gas station, or while your eyes are pressed tight shut, pretending to sleep. and whenever you kiss her back, it’s like you’re seventeen again, seventeen and buffy's hand never held a knife. 
> 
> //
> 
> post s7 finale au

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've had the first couple lines of this in my drafts folder since quite literally 2015 and have finally finished it :) 
> 
> cw for suicidal ideation, specific reference to faith's breakdown in angel s1e18

Nothing much changes. 

You sleep in the car still, mostly, and when you have enough for a motel room, you still sleep on the couch. 

You’ve fucked so much up with Buffy; you don’t want to fuck this up too. 

She’ll kiss you quite suddenly when the car’s stopped at a gas station, or while your eyes are pressed tight shut, pretending to sleep. And whenever you kiss her back, it’s like you’re seventeen again, seventeen and Buffy’s hand never held a knife. 

/ 

You turn south at Philadelphia. Buffy let you choose, and no part of you wants to go north, go towards Boston. The entire city’s a graveyard to you and you haven’t returned since you were forced to watch Kakistos skin your watcher alive. Your dad is still there, drinking himself to death in the same apartment you grew up in. Buffy doesn’t need to see that, doesn’t need to know what you would have become. 

“You ever been to D.C?” You ask instead, and Buffy excitedly talks about a family vacation with Dawn and her mother before her freshman year of high school. She talks to Dawn now, calls her once a week. Dawn seems to understand why you left, or she lies convincingly enough to Buffy to reassure her. Kennedy and Willow have taken over most of the training duties these days. You got a postcard from Kennedy once, delivered to the front desk of a motel in Ohio.  _ Come back soon _ , it said,  _ and don’t kill anyone with my gun _ . You think she meant it as a joke. 

The gun hasn’t been taken out of the car since you panicked in Colorado. It’s nestled deep in the glove compartment, wrapped in an old t-shirt. You can feel it sometimes, feel it heavy, reassuring in your hands, the way you begged Angel to kill you. 

/

The motel in Alexandria is one of the nicer ones you’ve stayed in. A grateful would-be-victim pressed money into your hands after you staked her date in an alley behind a club. Buffy’s morally opposed to taking money for slaying; you can’t afford to have morals like that anymore. She thinks you found a wallet at the laundromat, and if it means you have a bed to sleep in, you can lie to her. 

There’s two beds in the room, and a couch, and a TV that only plays local news. Buffy throws herself onto one of the beds, and turns up volume. It’s a piece on a kids’ carnival that was in town over the weekend; you find yourself watching the B-roll of children getting their faces painted, of children running and laughing, of children smiling at the camera, wonder if Willow turned one of the little girls into a soldier. 

“You okay?” Buffy asks, looking at you with her brow furrowed. You feel sick. 

“I’m going to take a shower,” and slam the bathroom door behind you. She follows you into the bathroom, holds your hair back as you dry heave. Your ribs hurt. 

“Food poisoning,” you say, and she sits next to you on the cold tile floor, her arm curled around your waist. You know she doesn’t believe you, but she doesn’t say anything. 

“Do you ever think about it?” Buffy whispers. 

“About what?”

“About who we’d be if we weren’t …” she gestures between the two of you. “Weren’t  _ this _ . I think I would have graduated college. I always wanted to be a vet when I was little. Maybe I could have done it.” 

You smile. Think about Buffy’s hands gently holding a child’s beloved pet; think about the ways she could knit them back together. 

“Well, do you?”

She’s looking at you with hope in her eyes like maybe this hasn’t fucked you up completely. You consider lying to her. 

“No,” you say instead. “I’d either be this or dead, babe.” 

/ 

You wake up suddenly at 5:13 in the morning, the cheap alarm clock blinking on, off, on, off, on, off. Buffy’s awake too -- you can feel her quietly breathing next to you, her arm heavy around your waist, her own bed abandoned. 

“What if we stop running?” she whispers into your hair. 

You turn to face her.

“We could stay here, forever. I’m sure there’s plenty to do, I could go back to school or  _ you _ could go back to school, or we could just ….” She trails off, her fingers tapping a nervous pattern on your hip. Her palm neatly covers your scar, like it never happened. 

The early morning light struggles through the dirty curtains. It’s like you’re perfectly alone, just you and Buffy and the soft gray light that makes her look eighteen again. 

You open your mouth to answer.  _ Yes _ , you want to say _ , yes _ , but it doesn’t come out. Buffy digs her nails into your hip, shuts her eyes, and kisses you. It’s different from all the other times she’s kissed you; she pulls you closer to her until you can feel her heart thumping in her chest, her pulse light under your fingertips. Her hands are cold on your stomach, under your tank top. It’s easy to close your eyes and kiss her, pretend that you’ll live here and get an apartment or even a house, and come home to her every evening, wake up with her every morning. 

She pulls away and looks at you, her eyes bright, kneeling between your legs. You nod.  _ Yes, I’ll stay with you, yes, forever, yes, please don’t stop _ . 

Buffy presses soft, open mouth kisses to your stomach, your hips, your thighs. You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. You twist her hair between your fingers, and she pulls your shorts down, around your ankles. Her mouth is warm, and wet and you come quicker than you want to, Buffy’s tongue pressed flat against you. She doesn’t move, her cheek resting on your thigh, and you gasp for air. After what feels like a lifetime, she crawls back up and kisses you, mouth open, messy, grinding her hips against your thigh. 

You can taste yourself on her tongue, and you feel her whole body relax when you touch her, when she arches into your hand. Buffy comes almost silently, biting into your shoulder as she tenses around your fingers. She buries her face into your neck, and everything is still. 

/ 

Somehow, you fall back asleep. When you wake up, Buffy is sitting on the other bed, quietly talking on the phone with someone. She smiles absentmindedly at you, and you can see the half-moon shape of her fingernails on your hips. 

“I’ll tell Faith,” she says to whoever she’s talking to, Dawn probably, and wraps and unwraps the cord of the phone around her finger. “We’re doing okay, somewhere in Virginia.” 

You raise your eyebrow at her, and she motions for you to come over. Too late, you remember your shorts are tangled somewhere in your sheets, but Buffy doesn’t seem to notice or mind. She hands you the phone, and mouths  _ Dawn _ at you, before she gets up and walks into the bathroom. You can hear the shower start. 

“Hi Dawnie,” you say into the phone. “What’s up?”

“Hi Faith,” and she sounds tired. It’s 4am in California, and you wish Dawn could be real, wish she could have a normal childhood. “Um, just so you know. We’re moving. Cleveland, Willow thinks. It’s more central, easier to get to.”

“Less memories,” you add, and you can hear Dawn go quiet on the other end. 

“Yeah,” she finally says. “I know Willow’s mad at you, but, if you and Buffy want, you can come back. You could come back.” 

“I know,” you answer, and Dawn sounds like she’s going to say something. Buffy turns the shower off, and you can hear her blow-drying her hair. 

“I know,” you say again, and Dawn hangs up. 

/

You don’t stay in Alexandria forever. You stay in Alexandria for two weeks, until you run out of money. 

Buffy catches you rummaging through the glove compartment, looking for Kennedy’s gun at a rest stop somewhere in Kentucky. She wordlessly goes to the trunk, and opens the emergency first aid kit. The gun is there, still wrapped in your t-shirt. 

“Angel told you,” you say, and it’s not really a question. 

“Yeah,” she says, “But I never thought … I didn’t think you would …” she trails off. 

“It’s okay,” and you sit next to her on the edge of the trunk. “I wouldn’t trust me with a gun either,” and you take it out of the first aid kit. “I don’t have the best track record.” You laugh, and Buffy just squeezes your hand. 

You sit there, the gun in your hands. Buffy shuts her eyes, tilts her face up towards the sun. 

“Can we take a detour?” 

Buffy nods. 

/ 

You throw the gun into the Cumberland River. Buffy watches you silently, and kisses your cheek when you get back to the car. She puts the car into drive, and speeds away from the river overlook, Kennedy’s gun in pieces at the bottom. 

“How does Cleveland sound?” She asks, staring at the road. “Dawn says she could use our help. We could get an apartment. Maybe a dog.” 

“Sure, babe,” you say. “Anything.” 

Buffy doesn’t reply, doesn’t even look at you, but you can tell she’s smiling. 

“Anything.”


End file.
